Economics Commons^™

Enabling Electric Storage Participation In Wholesale Markets: An Analysis Of Ferc Order No. 841, Glenn A. Smith

Master's Projects and Capstones

This study has been performed to understand the potential impact that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) Order No. 841 will have on the adoption of energy storage resources (ESR). This analysis looked at: (1) the Order’s requirements, (2) FERC’s exercise of its authorized jurisdiction within the Order, and (3) actions taken by the Regional Transmission Organizations (RTO), Independent System Operators (ISO) and FERC to demonstrate compliance with the Order’s requirements:

Order No. 841 utilizes a participation model to ensure ESR’s are able to participate in wholesale electricity markets to an extent that is reflective of a resource’s physical and …

Keeping Up Appearances: Spatial Spillovers And Housing Renovations, Nicholas B. Irwin

Molasky Family Department of Economics and Real Estate Faculty Research

Spatial spillovers from renovations can bolster urban redevelopment efforts by multiplying scarce city funds, creating a reinforcing feedback cycle of redevelopment. Using spatially explicit data on renovations from Baltimore, MD, we model the extent of spatial spillovers in housing renovations and estimate the effect of previous renovations on the likelihood to renovate while controlling for underlying spatial correlation. We find strong evidence of spatial spillovers with a neighbouring renovation increasing renovation likelihood by at least 1.8% These positive feedback cycles indicate the potential for significant private market multipliers from city‐led urban revitalization policies that encourage renovation.

The Behavioral Determinants Of Well-Being In Sierra Leone, Madison Levine

Master's Theses

Ensuring the needs of individuals are met leads to a more prosperous economy. Healthy economic activity is dependent on a supported community of people. These people express different levels of happiness depending on where they come from and make behavioral choices every day influenced by their association with their community. Currently most subjective data have come from western educated industrialized rich and democratic (WEIRD) areas. These results are placed as generalizations across all other countries and are not giving an adequate representation of well-being for the population in non-WEIRD areas. Our study outlines an in-depth survey covering subjective well-being measurements …

Temperature And Tempers: Heats Impact On Mood And Language, John Sutton

Master's Theses

Abstract: Temperatures above 20° Celsius have shown to adversely impact human behavior, leading to increased aggression and violence. Climate change will contribute to both the magnitude and severity of this pattern as temperatures continue their rise. Contributions to this field of research have only recently begun to analyze online behavior and language as a proxy for hedonic state, or well-being. From a development perspective this study is relevant since the poor tend to live in some of the warmest regions on earth, and would thus be disproportionately impacted by increased temperatures. We use several sources of data; U.S. based …

Mentoring Female Entrepreneurs: Revenue Analysis, Candy M. Moreno Garcia

Master's Theses

Throughout the world, significantly less women own businesses than their male counterparts. In addition, they tend to own businesses that are smaller, have less growth, are less profitable and have lower sales turnover than those of men. Supporting female entrepreneurs is crucial as they tend to spend more on the health of the household, nutrition and education. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial to determine the impact of a mentorship program between experienced female entrepreneurs and inexperienced entrepreneurs, specifically focusing on the impact to profits. I use data collected from three rounds of survey over the course of six …

The Long-Run Effects Of Tropical Cyclones On Infant Mortality, Isabel Miranda

Master's Theses

In the United States alone, each tropical cyclone causes an average of $14.6 billion worth of damages. In addition to the destruction of physical infrastructure, natural disasters also negatively impact human capital formation. These losses are often more difficult to observe, and therefore, are over looked when quantifying the true costs of natural disasters. One particular effect is an increase in infant mortality rates, an important indicator of a country’s general socioeconomic level. This paper utilizes a model created by Anttila-Hughes and Hsiang, that takes advantage of annual variation in tropical cyclones using annual spatial average maximum wind speeds and …

Are Menstrual Cycles A Biological Determinant Of Well-Being Amongst Sierra Leonean Schoolchildren?, Ashwini Shridhar

Master's Theses

The influence of hormones and biology on behavior is a topic that is rife with controversy, especially when it comes to sexual hormones. There is even more murkiness when it comes to the topic of menstruation and knowledge about women’s menstrual cycles. Recent research on this topic have seen a link between the hormonal fluctuations during menstrual cycles and various behavioral implications on competition, cooperation, and risk behavior. This study tries to expand existing knowledge by examining whether there is a link between hormonal fluctuations during menstrual cycles and risk preferential behavior using economic experiments in the largely understudied context …

Captive Nations: Measuring Economic Growth On Native American Reservations In California, Mahsa Ashabi

Master's Theses

A history of institutional oppression and genocide has shaped Native American communities across the United States today, reflected in large disparities of socioeconomic outcomes and infrastructure. Due to a lack of comprehensive data and macroeconomic research, alternative forms of spatial data and theories regarding human settlement are needed to develop an understanding ofthis stagnation. In our efforts to better understand growth on Native American reservations, we utilize nighttime lights data to proxy for economic output in these geographic areas, measuring the settlement characteristics ofreservations themselves and against surrounding U.S. regions. Through a series of log-log regressions that focus on Zipf’s …

The Effect Of Disability Status On Parental Input: A Study From India, Susann Skjoldhorne

Master's Theses

Human capital has for a long time been an important factor in economic growth theory. Previous literature shows a strong connection between parental input and the level of human capital attained by a child. The investment in child health and education has a positive effect on building human capital. When resources are scarce the allocation of resources will affect the opportunities that a child is given to achieve their potential. Gender preferences, birth order, and disabilities could all be factors that explain how parents chose to allocate their resources. Previous studies show that the distribution of parental input based on …

Aggression, Information, And Economics: Reinterpreting The Hermit Kingdom In The Era Of Kim Jong-Un, Margaret Pence

Master's Projects and Capstones

North Korea has been the most isolated country on the planet for the past sixty years. Due to its isolation, the Hermit Kingdom has naturally become mysterious, resulting in a common narrative that describes Pyongyang as aggressive and driven by nuclear weapons. Missing from this narrative is what motivates North Korea and its young leader, Kim Jong-un: survival. However, Kim Jong-un has a lot more than the outside world to contend with, as the North Korea he has inherited is much different than that of his predecessors. In response, Kim Jong-un has subtly shifted away from the state ideology of …

Fresh Blood In The Labor Market: Challenges And Rewards Of China's Returning Millennial Generation, Xinyu Li

Master's Projects and Capstones

In recent years, fresh blood has begun to emerge in China’s workplace: Chinese millennials who have gone abroad to study and received an overseas education. This special experience has brought many obstacles for them when they return to the Chinese workplace, whether it is the lack of synchronization between recruitment and graduation periods in the early stage of job seeking, or the pressure they encounter later. However, this experience also creates a set of unique advantages for them. Accepting international higher education makes their resumes more attractive, brings them a global perspective, and cultivates their ability to learn new skills …

Monetary Equilibrium And The Cost Of Banking Activity, Paola Boel, Gabriele Camera

ESI Working Papers

We investigate the effects of banks’ operating costs on allocations and welfare in a low interest rate environment. We introduce an explicit production function for banks in a microfounded model where banks employ labor resources, hired on a competitive market, to run their operations. In equilibrium, this generates a spread between interest rates on loans and deposits, which naturally reflects the underlying monetary policy and the efficiency of financial intermediation. In a deflation or low inflation environment, equilibrium deposits yield zero returns. Hence, banks end up soaking up labor resources to offer deposits that do not outperform idle balances, thus …

Empowering Female Entrepreneurs Through Mentorship In Medellin, Colombia: Results From The Field, Theresa Solenski

Master's Theses

Utilizing the power of local knowledge and peer networking, this study attempts to quantify the impacts of mentorship among female micro-entrepreneurs in Medellin, Colombia on empowerment. Developing countries such as Colombia have disproportionately high rates of unprofitable micro-businesses, many of which are managed by women. Internal constraints, such as disempowerment, play a central role in perpetuating poverty. We implement a 6-month mentoring intervention by pairing 18 successful entrepreneurs with 52 disadvantaged female, micro-entrepreneurs in Medellin, Colombia to measure the additional benefit of localized knowledge to micro-borrowers. Using a process of random assignment, I measure the change in female empowerment, measured …

Measuring Cocoa Agricultural Productivity: A Spatio-Temporal Econometric Approach, Yurlady Chaverra-Palacios

Master's Theses

A significant increase of 50.5 percent in the national production of cocoa was registered between 2011 and 2015 in Colombia. Nevertheless, 5,890 tons were imported in 2015 to supply domestic demand. Unlike other crops, the production of cocoa has made a significant contribution to the income of approximately 38,000 families of which 90 percent are small farm-producers with very little capital. Facilitating credit for investment is one of the main strategies of the national government to increase cocoa productivity. Correspondingly, the impact of the credit for investment on the cocoa agricultural productivity and if those investments have a spillover effect …

The Impact Of Cleft Lip/Palate And Clp Surgical Intervention On The Social Integration Of Adolescents In India, Mustafa Zahid

Master's Theses

Cleft Lip/Palate, a congenital orofacial anomaly, carries an incidence rate of approximately 1 in every 1000 births. In addition to the stigma associated with the condition, the varying levels of cleft severity might result in lower life outcomes which could include lower cognitive ability, physical and psychological well-being, social and behavioral outcomes of adolescents. This paper focuses on the social integration element of life outcomes, which is composed of the social inclusion and prosocial behavior of the adolescent. Despite the affordability of restorative surgeries, patients in rural areas of Low and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) such as India face accessibility and …

Economic Shocks And Personality Traits Of The Ultra-Poor, Shikhar Mehra

Master's Theses

Personality characteristics and non-cognitive skills are strong determinants of decision- making and economic outcomes. Personality is commonly believed to be stable, especially after age 30, though some evidence exists that changes in occupational or social roles, or exposure to family or health shocks, can change an individual’s personality traits in the medium or long term. Evidence on short-term impacts of shocks on personality, however, is lacking, as is evidence from rural and less educated populations. In this paper, we study the short-term effects of two kinds of shocks on personality traits among young adults from ultra-poor households in Uganda. In …

Connecticut Waterfront Property Premium In Areas With Flood Risk, Conor O'Donnell

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper investigates the premium paid for waterfront property along the Connecticut shoreline and how that premium is affected by its vulnerability to coastal flooding as measured by its location relative to the FEMA 100-year and 500-year flood zones. The primary analysis is a comparison of the rate of appreciation of properties within each flood zone relative to coastal properties outside the flood-zone. An analysis of the impact of Super Storm Sandy in 2012 on the appreciation rate is also presented. It is hypothesized that the rate of appreciation of properties within the 100-year flood zone is lower following Hurricane …

Measuring The Black-White Dissimilarity Index In Williamsburg And James City County Public High Schools, Sylvia Greer

Undergraduate Economic Review

In 2007, the Williamsburg-James City County (WJCC) School Board chose to open a third high school and redistrict the attendance of their public high schools.

I used a measure of racial unevenness to assess what this decision did to racial segregation in the school district. Using the black-white dissimilarity index, I found that the high schools have had increasing racial segregation from 2000 to 2015, with a significant increase due to the new school.

As the WJCC school board, students, and families move forward, they should be careful to measure and address the levels of segregation in the district.

The Argentine Great Depression, Laira Aggarwal, Francois Ries, Alejandro Salvador

Undergraduate Economic Review

The purpose of this paper is to comprehend the business cycle of the Argentine Crisis (1998-2002). The following paper will outline the crisis, starting off with a comprehensive literature review on the topic, analyzing its causes and consequences, followed by a survey on the policy-responses undertaken by the Argentine government to combat the recession. The crisis will then be analyzed in the context of the IS-LM model of macroeconomics.

A Statistical Analysis Of Economic Perceptions In The 2015 United Kingdom General Election, Amarvir Singh-Bal Mr.

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper characterises the vote which took place in the United Kingdom's (U.K.) 2015 General Election as an ‘accountability instrument.’ In doing so, the research interrogates which sections of the electorate hold the incumbent government more accountable for economic outcomes between the 2010 and 2015 U.K. General Elections. The Rational Choice Theory and the Michigan Model are used in this study to present two interlinked, and yet distinct, hypotheses – that less politically informed and non-partisan voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances; compared to the politically informed and partisan voters within the electorate. Implementing …

How Deep Is Your Love? Loss Aversion In Dating Markets, Genevieve B. Gregorich

Undergraduate Economic Review

This study uses experimental evidence to examine the existence of loss aversion in the dating market. Applying a valuation gap experiment, this study finds that people are loss averse when it comes to dating opportunities, meaning people weigh the loss of a dating opportunity more heavily than an equivalent gain. The results also support the hypothesis that people experience more loss aversion when they have fewer dating opportunities available. This finding provides preliminary evidence that the existence and growing prevalence of online dating, which dramatically increases peoples’ access to dating opportunities, reduces loss aversion, therefore increasing turnover in the market.

The Economics Of Weight Loss, Shivani Pandey

Undergraduate Economic Review

Obesity is now being considered one of the biggest health concerns globally. Ironically, while India records the largest no. of underweight population in the world along with China, it has also been placed in the top five countries in terms of obesity as per a new study by the Lancet Journal. Obesity entails various direct and indirect costs in terms of lower productivity and higher medical expenditure and has the potential to lower economic growth. This paper analyses the need for strengthening government regulations in the weight loss industry. After analyzing the causes of obesity and its negative effects on …

Impacts Of Contraception On Women’S Decision-Making Agency In Indonesia, Michaela J. Fogarty

Undergraduate Economic Review

Increasing access to contraception has the potential to empower women and improve the economic standing of families across the globe. Many researchers have explored the impacts of contraception on families and the determinants of women’s level of empowerment, but little scholarship exists on their direct relationship. This paper explores the impacts of contraceptive use on women’s empowerment, measured by a sum of women’s household decision-making agency. Panel data from three rounds of the Indonesian Family Life Survey is used to run multiple regressions with household fixed effects. Results suggest that women who use contraception have input on two additional types …

The Impact Of 2018 Tariffs On U.S. Trade Values Across Relevant Categories, Lydia Murray

Undergraduate Economic Review

The Office of the United States Trade Representative, under the direction of President Donald Trump, has implemented protectionist tariffs to an extent not seen in the past several decades. This paper explores data from the U.S. Census Bureau to analyze how the values of U.S. imports and exports have differed from what would have been expected for 2018 in the absence of tariffs. This is done by using past years’ data to create a predictive curve for 2018 trade values across several different product categories, which have been subject to tariffs. The general finding of this paper is that the …

Does Money Indeed Buy Happiness? “The Forms Of Capital” In Fitzgerald’S Gatsby And Watts’ No One Is Coming To Save Us, Allie Harrison Vernon

English (MA) Theses

Looking primarily at two critically acclaimed texts that concern themselves with American citizenship—F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Stephanie Powell Watts’ No One is Coming to Save Us—I analyze the claims made about citizenship identities, rights, and consequential access to said rights. I ask, how do these narratives about citizenship sustain, create, or re-envision American myth? Similarly, how do the narratives interact with the dominant culture at large? Do any of these texts achieve oppositional value, and/or modify the complex hegemonic structure? I use Pierre Bourdieu’s “The Forms of Capital” to investigate the ways in which economic, cultural, …

Financial Red Flags: Empirical Mapping Of Firm Political Preferences By Sector In Mexico, Ian Connors

Master's Theses

Can the stock market be used to determine the political preferences of individual economic sectors? This paper explores the conceptual relationship between electoral outcomes and financial markets in Mexico. Specifically, it analyzes how financial markets predict the expected effects of a given political platform on the performance of firms within specific sectors. To do this, the study used event-study methodology to calculate abnormal returns on stock prices across the nine sectors listed on the Bolsa Mexicana de Valores stock exchange following the historic election of leftist candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), On July 1, 2018. However, despite the uncertainty …

Adam Smith On Slavery, Jack Russell Weinstein

Philosophy & Religion Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Essays On Macroeconomics, Helu Jiang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Cohabitation, Marriage, and Fertility: Divergent Patterns for Different Education Groups. The United States has been experiencing a long-term decline in the rates of marriage and fertility and a steady rise in cohabitation. Contradicting the prediction of standard theory that emphasizes the opportunity cost of childrearing from labor market and gender specialization, skilled females have experienced a less pronounced drop in marriage and fertility, while unskilled females have experienced a more evident increase in cohabitation. I propose the following mechanisms to understand this puzzle: for high-skilled females, the higher implicit return of investment in children’s human capital compensates for part of …

Essays On Macro-Finance Affine Term Structure Models, Biancen Xie

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

In my dissertation, I focus on theoretical affine term structure models and the development of Bayesian econometric methods to estimate them.In the first Chapter, we address the question of which unspanned macroeconomic factors are the best in the class of macro-finance Gaussian affine term structure models. To answer this question, we extend Joslin, Priebsch, and Singleton (2014) in two dimensions. First, following Ang and Piazzesi (2003) and Chib and Ergashev (2009), three latent factors, instead of the first three principal components of the yield curve, are used to represent the level, slope and curvature of the yield curve. Second we …

North Central Extension Risk Management Education Center, Christine Lockert, Cheryl Griffith, Bradley D. Lubben

Cornhusker Economics

After several years of growing agricultural prosperity and U.S. net farm income that peaked at almost $124 billion in 2013, the most recent forecast from UDSA's Economic Research Service projects net farm income at less than $70 billion for 2019. The six-year cumulative decline since 2013 is primarily due to a drop in commodity prices, a result of growing supplies, and more recently, trade conflicts and declining exports for key commodities. While the aggregate financial position of U.S. agriculture remains relatively strong with an aggregate debt-asset ratio of less than 14% (USDA-ERS, 2019), total debt has grown while profit margins …